I’ve written about this expression before, and it is one of those that attracts all kinds of theories.
Well, I’ve now given it a second thought—and done some more research—and here’s the latest I’ve come up with.
'Codswallop' means ' Nonsense, rubbish, drivel'.
And the experts at the Oxford English Dictionary think they have nailed this one down.
They write that ‘codswallop’ was “Popularized in this sense (a sense which they may have coined) by writers Alan Simpson (1929–2017) and Ray Galton (1930–2018), who used it as a euphemism for a stronger expression (e.g. cobblers, bollocks—which were banned at the BBC at the time) in the British comedy series Hancock's Half Hour and Citizen James in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They chiefly used ‘codswallop’ in dialogue delivered by actor Sid James.”
The word did exist before they popularized it.
In an interview Alan Simpson said: “In the thirties, I was about seven or eight and my uncle used to use it as a proper noun, he used to call me codswallop.”
It's recorded as a mild putdown from around 1928, but it appears to have been given its current meaning by Simpson and Galton.
It’s not often we can name the coiner (or in this case, the coiners) of an expression—but sometimes (as here) I think we can.
At various times ‘codswallop’ has had other meanings.
It was once the nickname for a gossipy woman, and at other times was the name of a (horrible sounding) drink consisting of milk and beer.
But the common meaning today (‘nonsense, drivel’) seems to come from the creative minds of Alan Simpson and Ray Galton.
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